OStatic

One of the nice things about open source software is that it can experiment easily. Projects that don't have an obvious commercial route to success can still thrive and prove their usefulness, free of the demand to make money. One interesting project I've run across recently is WikidBase, which as the name implies crosses a wiki with a database.

With the open-source database market split between quite a few contenders, the ones who are not at the tip of everyone's tongue need to find ways to distinguish themselves. Ingres - the once closed-source database that was spun off from Computer Associates a few years back - continues to aim for the high-end corporate market. Their latest move in this strategy is the release of substantial portions of their OpenROAD 4GL as open source under a GPL license.